Information | Review |
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John Martin
ENAE441 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2024 |
I wish I could rate 4.5 stars, but planetterp doesn't let you. Anyway, there was a lot I liked about Dr. Martin and the way he ran the class. Apparently, this was the first semester with a "restructured" ENAE441 and it honestly went pretty smoothly. First off, Dr. Martin is an incredibly nice guy and is super knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this class and everything surrounding it. His lectures were some of the most interesting lectures I've been to. For a 9:30am class, there was not once where I felt like I was nodding off or bored. He really takes charge of the class and connects a lot of the material to things we may already be familiar with, including diagrams, examples, and answers to questions. Speaking of questions, he did not hesitate to answer them in class and often provided well-thought answers. If you thought of a question outside of class, he encouraged us to ask them in the discussion board on elms where anyone in the class could contribute and answer. Participation on the discussion board was also kept track of, providing those that were active on the board a couple extra credit points on exams. In terms of homework, to be completely honest, they were pretty hard and time consuming. The entire class is done through python due to Dr. Martin's (valid) belief that python is a valuable language to know in the real world. At first it can be a bit tedious to understand, but after a couple homeworks you get the hang of it. The homeworks often consisted of 3-4 long questions that required a lot of hard thinking to complete. However, these homeworks directly reflected the material taught in class and greatly helped with preparing for exams. I'm not sure what my grade would've been had these homeworks not been so thorough, but I have a feeling it would be lower than an A. Finally, Dr. Martin was pretty flexible to moving due dates for assignments. He was very understanding when it came to other classes having exams and big assignments on the same days and was very willing to accommodate us. The reason I am not giving a full 5 stars was more due to how the end of the semester was conducted. Before I say anything though, I think this was just a result of the new structure of this class and expect it to drastically improve in the coming semesters. The first thing that irked me was the timing of the second exam. We hadn't heard anything about it until about a week before it was scheduled, which happened to be the week before Thanksgiving break. Even though Dr. Martin gave us from Monday to Wednesday to start the exam, then an hour and fifteen to complete it, it felt extremely rushed and many felt that we could've at least heard about the exam much earlier. Then, he also assigned the last homework the same day he announced the second exam and made it due the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. Remember, these homeworks were very time consuming, and we also had three other classes that were assigning stuff to do the week after break. So, we were pretty much forced to start the homework over break unless we wanted to pull a few all nighters. Finally, instead of a final exam, we were given a final project. This was initially due a week after the last homework was due, which considering this is a final project, would be considerably more work than a typical homework. This on top of the fact that we only had a week to do it along with other final exams felt pretty unfair. Luckily, I think Dr. Martin realized this and decided to move the due date to the last day of finals. More on the final project, it was overall a really good culmination of everything we had learned, but there were a few HUGE typos that caused many people to spend a lot of time trying to debug in python on something that wasn't even their fault. Overall, I really loved Dr. Martin's class and generally how everything was run, but I thought that the end of the semester was way more stressful than it should've been. Again, I believe these are just products of a newly-structured class and will quickly get worked out, but it was just a bit frustrating to have to deal with. You really learn a lot from this class and I can confidently say that it was a valuable part of my education. |